I was busy looking for a good game on the N900 and got thinking about what would make a good smartphone game.

This was before this thread was created so excuse any tangents.

Yes, you could do a Call of Duty drone but what would be the point? Fiddly controls, and would look bad compared to PC.

In order to avoid the something-lacking comparison, smartphone games should depend on smartphone only features.

The only real smartphone-only feature is portability. The ability to play a game anywhere, any time. Indeed, some have even made this portability into an augmented reality game.
A game that you'd want to play even if you only have a spare few minutes must be easy to pick up where you left off.

To make up for the lack of graphics & sound, you must have a narrative.

Sometimes a narrative is text describing where you are and hinting at fun objectives. But a narrative can also includes AIs and other players.

Sure that AI is just a hundred lines of code but this is where suspension of disbelief comes in. The more engrossing the narrative, the more you want to believe that AI is real.

There's a guy, Mike Singleton, who's a bit of an 8-bit legend who created immense worlds on a 48k ZX Spectrum. In addition to from using a ton of internal RLE compression, he also wrote a novella for each game (Elite did that too) with some lovely artwork.



Your starting characters and many of the recruitable characters had authentic personality written in. Funnily enough, saving and reloading was such a hassle that if any of the died that was part of the evolving story that you are writing/participating in and you accepted it.

Of course it's easier to have other people be your AI in which case you're going online. With online games, you can use a phat PC to do all the heavy lifting.
But then you have to make it easy for players to relate to each other. Voice contact is a natural evolution, but for low bandwidth users, you really need emotes with typing as a backup.

Pocket Legends seems to be where it's at. However, MOBAs (eg Heroes of Newarth) are simple enough and if the heroes don't die too easily, latency shouldn't be an issue.